GEO audit

What does a GEO audit check?

Vendor and practitioner descriptions overlap in several areas:

• AI crawler access. Rules in robots.txt for bots such as GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI separates training (GPTBot) from search (OAI-SearchBot), so each bot needs its own decision.
• Technical basics. Crawlability, structured data, internal linking and canonicals, sometimes the llms.txt file.
• Content. Pages that answer common questions with self-contained passages, facts with sources, visible authors.
• Visibility in answers. Which prompts name the brand and which competitors appear repeatedly.
• Trust and entity signals. Consistent brand information and references on external sources.

The scope ranges from an automated report to a project with manual analysis.

What does Google say about requirements?

For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google lists no additional requirements. A page must be indexed and eligible for snippets. A GEO audit therefore overlaps strongly with a technical SEO audit and adds measurement in AI answers.

Example

An audit finds that robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot even though the owner wants to appear in ChatGPT search. In 20 tested prompts about the industry, none names the brand, while two competitors appear several times. This yields two separate actions, one technical and one content-related.

Checklist

• The key pages are indexed and eligible for snippets. Google names this as the requirement for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• robots.txt handles GPTBot (training) and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) separately, because OpenAI treats the two bots independently.
• OAI-SearchBot is not blocked if the page should appear in ChatGPT search answers. According to OpenAI, blocked sites can at most appear as navigational links.
• After a robots.txt change, plan for about 24 hours until OpenAI’s systems adjust.
• For Google: according to its documentation, new machine-readable files, special markup or Markdown are not needed. An llms.txt is therefore not a check item for Google.
• Practice: a fixed set of 20 to 50 real customer questions is queried regularly. The date, system, brands named and linked sources are recorded.
• Practice: company details on the own site, in the commercial register, directories and profiles are compared for contradictions.

Common questions

How does a GEO audit differ from an SEO audit? An SEO audit evaluates technology and content for classic search results. A GEO audit adds the question of whether AI systems mention the brand in answers.

How often should it be repeated? No reliable guideline exists. AI answers change, so some teams use continuous tracking.

Last updated: October 8, 2026